How to make an amazing short film: a festival director’s top tips

Make a shorter, simpler film and you can focus your resources on fewer locations and set-ups, and spend more time on the sound design, edit and grade.

Short films are strange beasts. They have a uniquely unenviable position of being near no one’s first choice of entertainment, so in some ways must teach an audience how to experience them in their few minutes of runtime. They can feel genius and vital, or totally irrelevant.

Many people would consider most short films bad. But why? Well, filmmaking is one of the more complex art forms to realise – and short films often represent artists’ first tussles with that mechanism and engagement with those layers.

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